My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia - Chinese historical romances. They're kind of analogous to Western epics. They're based on history, just like 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey' are based on history, but they're romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.
If I look back on my life, you can almost tell the story of it through pop songs. Romances as a teenager, your first kiss, first love, first heartbreak.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
Sometimes I look at music as like movies. And so I feel like you can have your comedies, and you can have your dramas, and you can have your romances or whatever.
To be honest, I chose romance because writing a book seemed so dauntingly long. I looked around for something short, discovered Harlequin romances, and decided to read a few to see if I could do it.
The big things in the average person's life are the romances that they have - and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension... these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn't have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.
One of the reasons people like romances is that they're artificially shaped to give a pattern and meaning. It's not as messy as everyday life or as difficult or thorny.
Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.
Going back to my own past as a reader, I was a big, big reader of romances, particularly as a teenager, the age that my books are aimed at.
I've found that readers of historical romances really like series because they get to revisit characters and find out what happens with them. I've done several series.
